Most developers who publish on third party stores push all updates at the same time, then it really depends who’s quicker in the approval process.

If the dev is on github, that might be the fastest (below the overview section under ‘assets’).

Might be so obscure that no active exploits remain in the wild.

Anyway most apps refuse to install on anything older than 9.0 now.

I do that regularly, with internal storage of 512 GB and higher, write speed to external devices is not unimportant at the very least.

Though with wifi 6 and higher you can get a decent throughput via ftp as well.

Hell yeah, good times!

Never heard of it, probably never will once I forget about this post.

Waze has speed trap warnings. They don’t have anything else (and were also bought out by Google), but for navigation, it rocks.

They are hiding it deliberately if people are more likely to leave critical or negative reviews.

I can’t leave reviews through the Google maps app either, the function is gone. If I open the mobile website, it’s there again.

Fucking hypocrites.

Reason number 24784 to stay on Android 12.

Yep, agree. Heat Signature was also fun, but getting rather repetitive.

Tactical Breach Wizards

I can’t switch to Linux due to software requirements for work. On my personal computer I’m using Xubuntu for well over a decade, I didn’t like the unity window manager of Ubuntu. I heard they changed to something else by now, but I can’t be bothered to switch.

I’m not aware of any alternatives, but then again I didn’t experience any problems so never bothered to look either.

I’ve used K9 for over a decade, until at some point work required me to have an exchange account. At that time I switched to Nine, since outlook is hot garbage.

My pleasure :-)

Triggered me to do a quick check:

Their privacy policy looks alright; and while I don’t like ads, they are gone in the minimum donation package of just 1 EUR, I think I did that just shortly after I started using them. https://www.lonelycatgames.com/docs/xplore/privacy - all the other parts seem privacy respecting, and the company is based in Slovakia, so has to respect GDPR by default. Website looks very dated and some of the other software has been abandoned a while ago, but they clearly state that and offer it as-is. Funny enough, I’ve also been using Disk Map for ages and never realized it’s from the same developer.

Because it hasn’t been update in half a year, or is there something else I’m not aware of?

X-Plore file manager, been using it for a solid decade. Can start an ftp server locally as well as connect to outside servers, really versatile.

Alternatively: Google pushes a totally innocent app with full access to all current and future photos amidst a digital arms-race of a fascist technocracy.

Would be my go-to as well. I’m using x-plore file manager on my phone to start an ftp server, and then push files via filezilla from my computer. Easy, and compatible with every OS out there.

Bypassing copy protection has always been the number one reason, it was never emulation per se.

I genuinely don’t know, I have set my browser to download pdfs by default and only open them with Sumatra. There might be a scripting layer active in the browser as well though, quite possible.

Yeah it does. Adobe has a lot of active script support, including java script for example, which can be exploited. If a software can’t interpret those scripts at all and simply displays plain text, that means malware won’t be executed.

And since Adobe Acrobat / Acrobat Reader are the most common pdf viewers out there, they are a natural target for hackers as well.

One more reason never to use the official adobe software. SumatraPDF is awesome. Barebones and blazing fast.

Why is that impressive? On older Android version it was force installed at some point, and since android 6 or 7 it comes bundled with the OS and can’t be disabled.

Sucks big time. I just polled the latest available update from the 27th, but I guess that’s it then. Will look into preparing my own packages, if I’m successful I will try to host them on github or something and share the link.

Woah, I never knew Hypatia is part of the Divest team. Here I thought I was unaffected by the shutdown… I wonder if they’ll keep the av updates coming, since they are provided by ClamAV.

Edit: Looks like the script that converts clamav to hypatia compatible packages is public, I’m tempted to run it myself and host the files on my own server. That way I can just set the database override link within the app to my domain and done.

https://codeberg.org/divested-mobile/hypatia/src/branch/stable/scripts/Main.java

Fennec or Icefox.

Anything good you can recommend? Haven’t seen much good since Witcher 3… And before that, maybe Gothic 2 or Oblivion.

Rubbish, the superuser app will prompt you if an app asks for permissions, and you need to grant it manually. The warning message is distinctively different from regular popups, and there is a 5 second cooldown timer before you can click it, to make sure it’s not happening accidentally.

You can bypass this crap, but you’ll need to root your phone to achieve that.

Afterwards you’ll need to install magisk (superuser app) and a bunch of plugins: play integrity fix and playcurl_next (to simulate that your phone is unrooted), and then FlagSecurePatcher (which is the actual module that’s overriding the screenshot block.

I don’t know anybody buying those crappy carrier deals, to be honest. They had a place and time in the early 2000s, but beyond that they seemed to die out mostly. Maybe still a thing in the US, no idea.

I never buy phones from carriers, always directly from manufacturers, so no idea. Manufacturer bloat can be deleted pretty straightforward.

My primary use case was magisk to enable taking screenshots from otherwise protected apps. Was living in China for almost 7 years, and even though I speak it quite alright, reading is a whole other level. And there are quite a few apps there that I had to use on a regular basis that had this damned flag_secure enabled so I couldn’t otherwise take screenshots to run them through a translation app.

The second one was system level adblock, since the alternative is for adblockers to install themselves as local VPNs routing traffic to 127.0.0.1; however being in China meant I actually had to use a real VPN to access the free internet, and I certainly didn’t want to choose between ads or privacy. The latter still applies; I’m using a VPN on most days.

Lastly, being able to use magisk also gives me access to some advanced security apps such as Hibernator (freezes apps, meaning they are basically uninstalled and reactivated on press, so they can’t use data, don’t get updated etc.), Storage Isolation (lets you configure on a per-app basis which folders it might access), App Ops (advanced permission management, which also includes an ignore function that acts like as if a certain permission was granted, but would feed random data or zeros to the app).

Being able to uninstall everything including system apps is also nice, though that can still be achieved with adb. Browsing root folders when looking for specific data is also nice, but I used that twice in about 5 years, so it’s probably not essential.

Luckily most devices work perfectly fine without internet. And I get the convenience of being able to switch on the heating or lower the window blinds and stuff from the office before leaving so that it’s nice at home, but we did that back in the 90s with a simple timer.

Same for my dishwasher. I don’t even understand why that thing asked for a wifi connection in the first place, it’s not like I can remotely unload it or anything. And a notification is perfectly useless when I can just check my watch…

With playcurl next I didn’t experience any issues yet, it’s polling a new device fingerprint every couple minutes to make sure your device never ends up on a blocklist, and you can trigger this manually in the magisk app as well.

Can’t guarantee it’s never going to be blocked if Google changes the algorithm, but that would just mean they have to adjust the fingerprinting as well.

Nah you can easily bypass play integrity on a rooted phone, see my comment above.

https://infosec.pub/comment/13265730

With a rooted phone you can install Zygisk (magisk + zygote) and then a bunch of modules that simulate system integrity.

What you need are “play integrity fix” and “playcurl_NEXT”.

The first module lets you bypass the google play integrity check, the second one will download updated integrity fingerprint files every 5 minutes to ensure that the bypass never fails.

If you know how to install custom ROMs, this part is not a big challenge.

Just keep it offline and get yourself a Nvidia shield as a multimedia station. They are excellent.

Wait a second, iOS is chock full of garbage that you can’t uninstall whatsoever. At least on Android you have a chance to get rid of everything.